


L’Homme Armé

by standalone



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Era, Canonical Suicide Attempt, Enemies to Lovers, Javert Lives, M/M, emulations of delightfully silly canonical prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 00:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13201452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: “Fortunate!” he expostulated with shuddering breath. “You call me fortunate even as you imprison me in a world I sought to flee?”“I call you fortunate,” Valjean affirmed.“I ought to have dragged you to the galley,” said Javert.*(In which Valjean rescues Javert, who is not happy about it, because what on earth is he supposed to livefor?)





	L’Homme Armé

**Author's Note:**

> * Please note that this story begins with a suicide attempt and includes discussions of suicide. *
> 
> Canonical reminders:  
> 
> 
>   * At the barricade, where Valjean went to save Marius, Valjean was supposed to shoot Javert, but instead let Javert go free and told him where he lived so that Javert could arrest him later  
> 
>   * Javert later caught Valjean when Valjean was saving Marius by carrying him through the sewers of Paris  
> 
>   * Instead of turning Valjean in to the police, Javert took Valjean home, then threw himself into the Seine and drowned
> 

> 
> For those who'd like pronunciation help, the title of this work sounds roughly like _LUMM arMAY._
> 
> Thanks, as ever, to the wonderful [werebear](http://archiveofourown.org/users/werebear/profile) for reading this way back in April and, as ever, leaving a heap of sterling suggestions that only took me eight months to fully resolve.

_“Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom, appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath the water.”_

_—_ Les Miserables _by Victor Hugo, translated by Isabel F. Hapgood, Vol. 5, Book 4, Ch. 1_

*

The first sensation was noise; the second, a terrible stillness. The splash of his body’s tumultuous impact on the water’s surface vanished as that surface reknitted itself above his head, and the depths were without sound. The third sensation was cold. Only fourth did his body begin to recognize pain. A splintering agony shot up his leg.

This was logical. He had seen, in the morgue, the twisted limbs of bridge-jumpers. Bones were not made to withstand such a fall.

His woolen inspector’s coat refused, at first, to take on water. For long seconds, it floated loose about him, a shield. Then the water penetrated and the heavy garment turned to icy manacles that dragged Javert further through the thick cold toward the floor of the Seine. 

He had rather expected to feel nothing by now.

Instead, as astonishing as an ambush, he felt two more things in rapid order: a sharp concussion reverberated through the wounded leg as it struck the refuse-littered soil of the bottom, and then, in such immediate succession that his mind was still only beginning to receive the agonizing reports from his leg, something whiplike and swift grabbed at him. It wound around him once, then twice. There were no octopodes in the Seine, no giant squid. What manner of beast, then, was this?

A hammering pounded him from within: his heart. Javert had certainly not expected this death to bring terror. He reached for his cudgel—but why? To beat back this monster, this demon of the deep, that sought to accomplish only the very same task to which he had set himself? Besides, he was below the water. His submarine bludgeoning would be slow and ineffective. Why fight? There was no sense to it. He let his hand relax.

Still, he would like to know what mode of beast this was. In his final moments, as his lungs exhausted their last aching gurgles of breath, he might yet see a thing no man had seen. Javert forced himself to look that he might see.

This latter was not to pass. Javert believed his eyes to be open, but all about him was black. 

The tentacles tightened about him. He willed himself to be still. 

Then the thing began to tug.

Javert found himself dragged upward—he believed it to be upward, but could not be certain—through swirling waters. It was slow progress, and his head spun with asphyxia. _I will be dead before I reach the surface_ , he thought with some satisfaction. _The world has finished for me._

His mind went clear of all thought. He hung in emptiness that seemed eternal, devoid of sense or feeling of any kind. 

Had he been capable, in that moment, of reflection, he would have termed it pleasant.

It lasted for what he would have called an eternity, but which passers-by, had there been any present, would have counted at two minutes and one half. It was nothing, black and cavernous.

Then, in a sudden and horrid burst that originated, base and low, in his water-bloated stomach and erupted in a geyser-like projection from his mouth, Javert found himself very much in the world once again. He sat stark up, hardly noticing in his vomitous state that he was again on solid land, and rocked forward onto his knees that he might better let spew the foul water that filled him. The position was rather like that of the penitent.

A firm blow between his shoulder blades loosed another burst of that odious liquid. Javert shuddered. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat, but found his coat sodden.

Then he turned to confront the beast.

As the reader has surely conjectured, this beast that pulled Javert—wet raiment doubling his weight—to safety, with the tenacity of an octopus and the strength of a whale, was no animal of the deeps, but a man. 

It was Jean Valjean.

The man was dripping wet. A brutal wind whipped at his white shirtsleeves. A lesser man might have trembled with the cold. The criminal Valjean was immobile.

Deep in Javert’s chest, a crucible of molten rage began to boil. He attempted speech, but only succeeded in expelling more water. 

Valjean clapped him on the back once more. Javert coughed and sputtered until he was certain no liquid could remain. He spat and turned.

Valjean, untying and neatly bundling the ropes that encumbered Javert, was looking back and forth between his rescued man and the high bridge above them. 

“We must go,” he said, and pulled Javert firmly to his feet. 

Javert’s left leg crumpled in an explosion of agony.

“Leave me,” Javert ordered. The pain lent the command an indescribable fierceness.

“You are injured,” Valjean noted.

“Leave me,” Javert said again.

Moving to Javert’s left side, Valjean wrapped an arm below Javert’s and around his back.

“We are leaving.”

“No,” Javert said, louder.

“Be quiet,” Valjean ordered. “Climb.”

Javert found that little as he wished to follow these directives, even less did he wish to feel his wounded leg collide with the stone steps that led up the side of the canal. Depending upon the strong arm at his back to carry what he could not, he hopped, step by painful step, alongside Valjean.

Seeing Javert’s difficulty in moving, Valjean slowed the pace but continued steadily onward.

This tenacity, which reminded Javert of the extraordinary lengths to which Valjean had gone to rescue him from a death of his own choosing, struck Javert as the deepest of insults. He hissed into the other man’s ear:

“Malefactor! Breaker of laws! You would impose your will upon my person?”

Valjean did not hesitate in his labored ascent up the stone escarpment. “I am saving your life.” Gaining the top of the bank, he leaned Javert against a post.

“No law demands that I live.”

If Jean Valjean heard this, he gave no indication. He gazed levelly at Javert for a long instant, in which Javert found himself transfixed and horrified by the serenity of the other man’s countenance. This was a man who, he reflected, had snatched him from the gnashing jaws of sure death twice in as many days, who had willingly, and with full knowledge of the depths of wretchedness such an offer would entail, offered to relinquish himself to the the eternal encumbrance of iron chain and stone cell, who had in this last two days suffered untold privations to preserve not one but two dying men—the first of whom, to all appearances, meant nothing to him, and the second one with whom every moment’s intercourse had been steeped in acrimony. Such a man was Jean Valjean.

To support the dazed, wretched, and sodden Javert was nothing to the toils of Valjean’s prior day. Hooking an arm below the staggering Javert’s back, he half-led, half-dragged him along the waterfront, in shadowy concealment past l’Hotel de Ville, and onto the Rue de Chaume.

“A life is a debt,” Javert essayed once more on this last street. His legs, weakened as they had been by desperation and by the cold which still gripped them, had regained sufficient feeling that he thought he no longer required the arm about him.

He attempted to pull away from Valjean and walk on his own. Valjean held him fast.

“The leg will not hold you,” Valjean said. “It has broken.”

“Unhand me,” Javert snarled. He pushed the man away and whirled about as if to take another direction—he knew not where, but _any_ other than that inexorable path to humiliation upon which Valjean led him.

His broken leg seized him with such pain that he cried out and lost consciousness.

*

He awoke in an unfamiliar room. He was alone, but there could be no doubt that he was not in his own home, and that, wherever he was, he had been brought thenceforth by that criminal, Jean Valjean. He had been lain flat upon the floor. He was wet and shivering with cold and pain. He did not dream of stirring. The agony was too terrible.

A fire blazed at the room’s small hearth, but the warmth did not penetrate his soaked clothing.

A tap came at the door, then a pretty face peered around the edge of the frame.

“Oh!” she gasped. “Papa! Come quickly! He is awake!”

 _Papa_ was evidently none other than Valjean, for presently that man, in fresh clothing but with thick hair still damp, appeared with a distribution of linens.

“Thank you, my dear,” he said to the girl, dismissing her and closing the door. To Javert, he said, “I hoped you would not awaken until we had got you into more comfortable circumstances. I have brought dry clothing, and there is a bed. Will you require assistance in unburdening yourself of these sodden things?”

He asked with a delicacy that called to Javert’s mind the whole of Valjean’s history. He recalled that this man had once been a captain of industry, that he had been beloved of an entire town, that he had solved with equal discretion and compassion the problems of millionaire and beggar alike. To offer the intimate assistance of undressing another man was, to a man like Valjean, no less comfortable than to offer to a widow a hand down from her carriage.

Javert tried to say that he would not need help. His chattering teeth refuted him. He could not even form the words. 

Indeed, as Valjean carefully stripped the layers of wet wool from his body, it was all Javert could do to ball his frozen fingers into fists to ease the sleeves’ removal. To unfasten the many catches and buttons of his uniform would have been an impossibility. 

With a diffused attention that succeeded in reducing the inspector’s humiliation, Valjean swathed Javert in a dry chemise, then wrapped him in a quilted robe. Without asking, he sank to a knee, slid arms below Javert, and lifted the burly man into the waiting bed. He wrapped bricks, hot from the grate, in clean blankets and placed those at Javert’s sides, then he tucked the bedclothes tightly around him.

“You are fortunate,” Valjean said then. “The skin of the leg has held, so we need not fear infection. When the doctor comes, he will set the broken bone.”

Javert had said nothing this whole time.

“Fortunate!” he now expostulated with shuddering breath. “You call me fortunate even as you imprison me in a world I sought to flee?”

“I call you fortunate,” Valjean affirmed.

“I ought to have dragged you to the galley,” said Javert.

Valjean made no reply. He had provided Javert his address when he gave him his life at the barricade. Why, if not to be arrested?

“I ought,” Javert continued after some length. “Yet I did not. Why did I grant you freedom—to you, a common criminal, a convict, an escapee whose daily existence flouts the laws I have sworn my life to uphold? Why did I not return you to your just and righteous punishment? Why did I permit your rash act of weakness in releasing me to take precedence over the exactitude of the law? You are a man marked for prison, Valjean. Why did I free you?”

Again, Valjean remained silent. He added wood to the fire in the hearth; the flames set in at once to devouring the dry fuel.

As the cold crept from his bones, it was replaced by pain—dull, at first, then increasingly demanding and dire, a fierce pain that attacked his brain fast and vicious as a street riot.

“I am an inspector of the police. I cannot abet a criminal in escaping the law.”

At this, Valjean turned. The light of the fire lent his hard features a solemn cast. “Then you may arrest me.”

“I cannot move,” Javert growled. “I am injured. I am your guest, or your hostage. How can I arrest you?”

“Toussaint will carry your missive to the station-house. They will dispatch a squadron.”

Javert considered this. This odd convict spoke with absolute guilelessness. Even now, after all that had transpired, he offered away his freedom as easily as a rich man passes down his old coat.

 _You are meant to be a rogue_ , he accused. _You are meant to be a monstrous blight on society. Why did you not kill me and have done with it? That I could have borne. Your kindness is unbearable._

“I cannot,” Javert said. He spoke coldly; and is it any wonder? Had he better heeded the pain in his leg, his words would have left wounds. He added, flinching at the control speech required, “I will not. Little as I cared to keep it, you have saved my life. I will not squander yours.”

Valjean nodded soberly. “Sleep, then. I have sent for the doctor, but it may be hours.”

“You deserve to live free, yet the law demands your imprisonment. Both are right, and yet they form a contradiction. You should have allowed me to die.”

“You say I deserve freedom. Why, then, do not you deserve the same?”

“I have betrayed my ideals and my honor. I know not what to believe. Would you shackle me to doubt?”

“I would have you live. Show yourself brave.”

Javert scoffed. “Bravery is egotism.”

Busying himself with bundling the soaked garments, Valjean did not seem to have heard. Before departing the room, though, he paused. “And what, then,” he asked, “is suicide?”

At this, Javert fell back into stupefied reflection. He did not stir. Even after Valjean had built the fire to a small inferno and departed for his own chambers, Javert sat in blank observation of the torpor of black morning outside the small room’s guillotine window. He felt that he was drowning in a murky, ice-rimed river of agony, neither asleep nor awake, in the purgatory that was to be his final reward. Only when the day had begun to dawn did Javert permit his eyes to close. 

*

He awoke from his tortured half-sleep to commotion in the next room. Evidently the doctor had arrived. “He has fallen,” he heard Valjean explain.

 _I have fallen_ , Javert repeated to himself, remembering. _I am fallen. The evidence speaks for itself. Criminal though he may be, I cannot return this man to the galley. But what, then, am I?_

The doctor, grave and efficient, made quick examination of the leg. “I am needed everywhere today,” he said by way of apology for his brusque manner. His slender hands probed at the tenderness in Javert’s thigh, and Javert gritted his teeth. “Well!” the doctor exclaimed. “This is truly fortunate. The femur has cracked, but it remains intact. We need set only the bones of the lower leg.” He called to Valjean, who lurked quietly in the doorway. “Monsieur, you must hold him still. The muscles have constricted; to set the bones will require some force.” 

Javert objected vehemently when he felt the bitter spoon pressed to his mouth. “I prefer to retain my senses,” he said when the doctor had moved the spoon away.

The doctor shrugged. Then, without warning, he gave Javert’s wounded leg a terrible jerk. The pain blinded him and occluded every thought but that of immediate revenge. He flew up from his pillow, hands ready to throttle this villain, but the doctor had leaped away from the bedside so that Javert grappled, impotent, at the blameless air.

“Take the drugs,” the doctor said. “I would rather survive this call.”

Ashamed, Javert permitted the doctor to feed him the vile tincture. 

Until this morning, he had never in his life tasted opium. He had prided himself upon this. This was a bad day for Javert’s pride.

In time, the room around him grew less distinct, and the omnipresent pain in his leg faded to a dull discomfort. When he closed his eyes, he felt hands grip him.

He did not feel the pain, not precisely, but he felt the pulling, and he heard the splintered bones scrape across one another as the doctor and Valjean wrestled them back into alignment. Javert felt that perhaps he was moaning, or sobbing. He flung his head sideways just in time to retch. 

“It is stable,” the doctor’s voice said through the blood-red turmoil of Javert’s mind. “See to him.”

A warm cloth rubbed at his cheek and throat, carrying away the odor of sick. Javert heard the cloth rinsed and the action repeated. At the same time, it seemed that the doctor was binding the limb tightly to some framework.

“I must depart,” the doctor said. “I am leaving laudanum and instructions for its administration. I will call tomorrow if I can.”

The hand paused where it had been wiping at his ear.

“You have my gratitude,” Valjean said. Javert heard the rustle of paper money. “See to it that you come.”

*

Javert’s waking countenance, after this, was marked by utter rejection of all that life now offered. He would have no more to do with the drugs. He refused his soup, wrenched himself away from the cool hands that smoothed his brow, and spat venomous vitriol at any intruder in his room.

After things had been allowed to go on in this way for some duration, Valjean entered the chamber alone. Javert turned to the wall.

“I beg your forgiveness, my God,” Valjean said from very near Javert, “and yours, Monsieur. The doctor will not return otherwise.”

And kneeling upon the cushion, by force, he took Javert’s head upon his lap, introduced a spoon between the lips, and attempted to tilt the contaminating medicine into Javert’s mouth.

Javert spat; the spoon flew and medicine spattered the bedclothes. 

“I confess that I expected this response,” Valjean said, at once tightening his grip and pressing a small bottle between Javert’s teeth. He tilted Javert’s head back. Javert had known Valjean’s strength, but never before had he so directly battled against it. The bitter liquid filled his mouth and blocked the passage of air. If he only swallowed it, he would breathe. If he did not, he would at least retain the use of his senses until the end came. 

Valjean would have to fight him unconscious before he would willingly pollute his faculties again. But the man seemed disinclined to fight. One hand below Javert’s prickly chin and the other strong arm clasped tight enough to immobilize Javert’s chest and arms, Valjean made no further attempt at force. “You are a guest in my home,” Valjean said. His voice was low enough that, more than Javert heard the words, he felt their vibration in the broad chest at his back. “I wish you no ill, and will allow no harm to visit you—not even from yourself. You must recover.”

Javert could not recollect a time when he had heard another human’s voice transmitted not through air but through flesh.

When Javert finally gulped and felt the medicine rush into his veins, it is possible that Valjean, too, drew a deep and reassuring draught of air. 

Valjean remained, holding the policeman’s head in his lap, until delirium had crowded out all thoughts of resistance.

*

The weeks passed slowly, in alternating hazes of pain and drugged euphoria. After the first time, Javert permitted Valjean or the doctor to administer the laudanum. There was no escaping, and he would prefer at least to avoid the indignity of again being coddled into sleep in his rescuer’s arms. 

He remembered most those moments when Valjean entered to tend to him. He remembered Valjean’s eyes, at once piercing and concerned, over the small glass with its blood-brown dose of the drug. He remembered fingertips on his own, carefully handing the glass over and as carefully reclaiming it. He remembered that better than the imminent relief from pain was this moment of human touch.

He had survived his own death, and as a result, he was here. His world had narrowed from the grey and teeming streets of Paris to this single room, two other men, one nervous serving-woman, and a curious and pretty girl.

*

The girl, or young woman, perhaps, as she was old enough to have finished school, was named Cosette. She believed herself to be Valjean’s daughter. Javert, who knew a little about Jean Valjean, doubted this, but he made no attempt to correct her misapprehensions. She began to bring her sewing to the chair at the corner of Javert’s room in the afternoons. She would tell him about the plants she had seen on her days’ strolls with her father through the Luxembourg or the Tuileries; when he was sufficiently conscious to acknowledge the gift, she would sometimes present him with a flower or a sprig of green leaves as a small souvenir. 

Cosette appeared less curious about his presence than pleased by it. Calling him at first _Monsieur_ and later _Monsieur le Visiteur_ —which she even later shortened to _Monsieur le Vis_ so as to fit it into one of her little songs, where it rhymed with _fleur de lys_ —she never pressed him to reveal his own history, but brought her blossoming life into it. She often sang—children’s tunes and hymns—and when her sewing was pretty instead of practical, she would ask him to admire her embroidery or cutwork.

Had he been better acquainted with the decorative arts, he would, no doubt, have recognized the industrious productions of a bride preparing her trousseau, but Javert knew little of these things. He did note the evenness of her stitches, for as a neatly-appointed wearer of uniforms, he had sufficient facility with a needle to appreciate the difficulty those placid little dots of thread belied, but his thoughts drifted.

As his reliance on the laudanum lessened, Javert became increasingly conscious of the repeated motif of a letter P in Cosette’s needlework. As best he could figure, there were no Ps in this household. When he one day thought to ask about it, the girl blushed.

“I am to marry, Monsieur le Vis,” she said. “A gentleman whose surname begins with the letter. He is a lovely man, injured—like you—but, praise the Lord, he is recovering.” She caught herself and smiled warmly at Javert. “Recovering, also like you.”

*

After weeks of confining him to the bed, the doctor one day arrived with a crutch and announced that Javert might attempt a brief turn about the room. The tool was unwieldy, but Javert was glad to be able to take back some modicum of responsibility for himself. Within two days’ span, he began to leave the room in exploration of the larger flat. Shortly thereafter, Cosette invited him to dine with her and her father rather than in the solitude of his room. 

“You _must_ , sir,” she cajoled. “My father is greatly preoccupied with your well-being; I implore you to ease his concern by joining us at table.” This, of course, she said with a smile, so that her words might express a truth and a joke at the same time.

Gruffly—for this latest kindness seemed to catch in his throat—Javert accepted the offer.

Mealtime conversation was as he would have expected; the girl chattered, the man Valjean sat taciturn but benevolent. As to Javert, both were solicitous; they asked him to have more fish, pressed upon him the potatoes or wine or bread, inquired as to his health. Despite his body’s inactivity, he ate well.

He sat sometimes now, in the aftermath of the evening meal, in one of the old-fashioned armchairs of the sitting room, opposite Valjean, who kept a small fire burning in the hearth despite the clemency of the weather outside. Javert thought the fire must be for the sake of him, the invalid guest, but did not inquire.

So their lives passed for well over a month, during which time Cosette’s trousseau grew nearly as rapidly as her enthusiasm, and the ache in Javert’s leg dissipated from agony to irritation. The doctor, upon examining it in late summer, said, “It is time you were done with the crutch. Allow the leg to serve you again.”

It hurt. That was undeniable. And it humbled him to hobble, arms wheeling through the air for balance, just to traverse his small room, let alone the whole flat. Although the inert flesh resisted its return to service, Cosette was, in these endeavors, his constant companion, and her gentle entreaties to endure one more minute’s walking, then another, fortified him and built a certain determination. If he did not care to succeed for his own sake, at least he would not disappoint her. 

At first she only strode beside him, her gait measured to keep pace with his own, but as he grew more steady, she began to let a hand rest in the crook of his arm.

“May I, Monsieur?” she asked the first time, her face tilted cheerily toward him. She wore a long summer frock in pale blue; she had already been walking in the public gardens this morning with her father, as was their custom, and her skin bore the warm flush of exertion.

Javert, through a jaw tight with discomfort at the burning sensation of disused muscles returning to service, said only, “If you like,” but she took this as a ready assent. Thenceforth, when he took his exercise through the apartment, it was with Cosette’s arm through his and her ready tales in his ear.

Hers had been, it seemed, a life of isolation and deprivation, of strict nuns and little companionship—and yet, dotted throughout the severe history, were joyous moments, clearly treasured, in the gardens with her father.

“To call Papa a man of few words,” she said, laughing, “would seem an understatement; except that I am talking to you, Monsieur le Vis, so to you he must seem verbose—and _I_ garrulous!’

She adored her father—for so Javert had come to regard him—and spoke of him often. In her stories, Valjean was a constant, strong and reliable, always watching and always generous. Every decision he made, it seemed, was in service of another.

“He does so little for himself,” she mused. “If I am ill, he does not even think to take a meal. When we first went to live with the _religieuses_ , I must admit—” and here she whispered a bit, as if anyone else might overhear and be horrified at this tender blasphemy, “—I thought at first, when they spoke of the lord who sacrificed all to save us, I thought they meant my father. I recall so little of my early years, but I think they must have been painful, for I truly believed that my father saved me.”

Valjean was frequently out for short spells; the first time he returned to find the policeman arm in arm with his daughter, he paused at the end of the corridor, where he was hanging his coat and hat, to watch. Javert felt himself tense with apprehension; of course he had intended no wrong, but was it not enough that he had, however unwillingly, imposed himself upon their household? To admit Cosette’s touch was to presume a level of belonging which he ought never to have permitted himself.

Cosette, however, welcomed her father warmly with not the slightest indication of discomfort, and as it was, of course, _she_ who gripped _him_ , Javert could scarcely shake his arm free.

“Monsieur,” he said, stiffly.

“ _Bon soir_ ,” said Valjean, heavy brows spread broad, as if he were smiling. “You make good progress, I am pleased to see.” 

Javert’s shame at this was great. “Perhaps we shall soon see an end to my demands upon your hospitality.”

“Monsieur le Vis!” Cosette interjected. “You cannot possibly believe—” 

Valjean cleared his throat. “Had I not wished to have you as a guest, sir, I would not have brought you to my home.” Still, his brows drew downward and stayed so until he walked from the room to attend to some business.

Cosette looked after him fondly. “You must believe him,” she said. “We have so few visitors, and of course, I would never wish to pry into his affairs, or yours, but please know, he wishes for you every thing that is good.” 

“Where do you go?” Javert asked bluntly, that evening, after they had bade Cosette good night. Valjean looked at him quizzically. “If I am not very much mistaken, you live off your ‘income’” (this with an ironic twist), “so your errands cannot all be business. You have a servant to shop for the household. You depart and return without baggage.”

Valjean nodded at Javert’s perspicacity. “I am glad to see your wits returned.”

Perhaps this, too, should have awakened shame in Javert, at the memory of his dulled and senseless weeks of drugged compliance, but instead, he remembered only the sympathy in Valjean’s eyes as he offered the cup, and less than shame, he felt a sort of pride at having emerged with his faculty for observation still sharp.

“I am an inspector,” Javert reminded him.

“So you are.” Valjean, who rarely wasted a gesture, ran a large hand down the sides of his jaw, fingers and thumb meeting at the chin. “I find, Inspector, that it is sometimes within my power to lighten other people’s burdens.”

“Ah,” Javert said, and revised his image of Valjean: leaving the house with pockets filled; returning each time a little lighter. “So, you have many friends.”

Valjean shook his head at this. “No,” he said. “Not friends. For a man such as I, to sustain a friendship would be to entangle yet another innocent in this web of deceit.”

So Valjean’s outings, while they might bring him charitable pleasure, brought him little in the way of companionship. His home, however, lacked him; when he was away, one felt the absence of his steadiness as one might on a ship improperly ballasted.

*

Oddly, Javert found that imagining Valjean’s solitude saddened him. Odd, first because he was himself habitually solitary—more so, really, than was Valjean, whose daily routine included interactions with family and other acquaintances; and secondly, odd because he would not have expected to care. Yet Valjean’s daughter was to leave his home, and this, now that Javert knew her, and knew what she was to her quiet but devoted father, seemed an indescribable loss.

Cosette spoke little of the man she was to marry—whether from shyness or decorum, he could not say. During his exercise one day, Javert stumbled when he placed too much weight at once on the healing leg, and to distract Cosette from the demonstrations of her infinite solicitude, he inquired a little as to the health of her betrothed.

Blushing, she said that all was proceeding beautifully, that the man was recovering well, and in so saying, she named him. In that moment, for Javert, all came together: The lover’s name was Marius. 

Jean Valjean had gone to the barricade to save this man; Javert saw this now. Thus it must be thanks to this Marius that Valjean had spared Javert, which is to say that it was thanks to Marius—or perhaps to Cosette’s devotion to Marius, and Valjean’s devotion to Cosette—that Javert continued to possess a heart that pounded and lungs that consumed air.

He had once commandeered the help of a Marius in a sting of that band of criminals that called itself _“la famille Jondrette_. _”_ Somehow, he felt instinctively, this must be the same man. Javert was not a man to believe in fate, and yet, every thread of his life seemed another stitch in the seams that bound it to that of Valjean. 

“Praise God,” Javert said, automatically, and Cosette beamed at him. He had a passing sensation of guilt; surely, his few words were insufficient to earn him such a benediction of affection.

One week into his exercises, his steps had grown steady and he could pace the long hall for fifteen minutes without tiring.

*

A few evenings further on, in the sitting room, Javert decided to voice a question that had lodged some time earlier in his brain. “Those candlesticks,” he said, nodding at the heavy silver pair on the hearth, “where’d you get them?” All other furnishings in the room were Spartan in their plainness—rigidly clean and practical. The ornate metal seemed to belong in another home entirely from this one, where meals were served on cheap stoneware and the candles at table sat in squat holders that left their light too low to see much but the food on one’s plate. Like Cosette, like Valjean’s stately honor, these things were worlds better than the place they occupied.

“From Forgiveness personified,” Valjean said, speaking slowly, not with reluctance, but rather as if he’d been called back from a distant past. “I stole from a man who had given me everything; yet the man called the theft a gift, and bade me take those, too, and begin anew.

“I keep them to remember who I have been.”

“Hmph,” snorted Javert, and he glared into the wan flames.

This man had chosen criminality, yet lived free. Javert had chosen death, yet lived still. Where was _his_ freedom?

“You dislike being bound to me,” Valjean observed.

“It is not right. I owe you a debt that I cannot repay.” He did not say “you, _a criminal_ ,” but the meaning, cloaked in the ironic weight of the _vous_ , was unambiguous.

Valjean nodded toward the candlesticks. “It is a hard feeling,” he said. “I owe you the same.”

“They are not the same!” Javert cried. “Your choice to spare me was an honest deed. Mine was a crime.”

“Then we are each of us criminals,” said Valjean, brows so low they touched. “And this, too, binds us. But nothing prevents your leaving. Your leg has healed. You wear new clothing, you limp, you have become thin. You wish to leave—and you may. At this instant, if you wish it, you may rise and depart. You will find, in the bureau beside your bed, a purse containing sufficient to transport you to any township in France, to establish a home, and to adopt the guise of a gentleman living off his income. Nothing could be simpler.”

The words were unemotional, but once said, they were final. Were these not precisely the past actions of Valjean himself? He would not inquire into the source of the funds. The time had come for Javert to make his choice.

Javert rose. He would not admit it, but his leg ached. He went to his room and found the heavy purse and a plain black coat. He put the purse in the pocket and donned the coat. This done, he returned to the sitting-room.

“Valjean,” he said stiffly. “Leaving will not sever this bond.”

“Monsieur Javert.” Valjean held out his hand. “Do what you must. I will understand.”

“Thank the girl for me,” Javert said, for he would not prolong this moment, shaking the hand.

*

Javert did not leave Paris. He did not, for long, even leave the Rue de l’Homme Armé. In fact, after a few days’ reckoning at a cheap hotel, where he contemplated an inner map and discovered an absolute absence of wanderlust, he returned to the little street where Valjean had brought him, and found a furnished single room to let at the top of a dark staircase across the street and several doorways down from the flat in which he had lived both the worst and the kindest days of his life.

He was entirely free of the drugs now. His mind’s clarity restored, he had been able to plot his rooming strategically. Despite its water-stained walls and moldy floors, this room offered a nearly direct view to the front windows of the “Fauchelevents’” flat and of their door that let into the street. From here, he was easy witness to their comings and goings.

The landlady, for a small fee, supplied Javert with bread, meat, and water. The bread was stale, the meat stringy, and the water insufficient, but it was enough to maintain Javert in his single-minded surveillance.

*

From his shabby room, he watched Cosette and Valjean and tottering Toussaint enter and exit their flat. 

He had sacrificed himself, everything he stood for, for this man, and he did not know why. He had nothing else for which to live, yet he could not live without knowing that Valjean was... whatever Valjean _was_. 

He felt that he was testing himself, seeking like Daedalus some path through the twisting maze of his choices. When he found his way, would it be to turn Valjean in, as he’d meant to do that first night? To do so seemed unthinkable. On the other hand, to simply walk away seemed equally distant from the realms of reality. Valjean was right—there was a bond. He could not pretend otherwise.

He wondered what Valjean had told Cosette. For the first days of his occupancy of the room, he noted that she cast her gaze broadly about the street upon descending the front steps with her father for their morning walk, but in time, that searching mien seemed to fade.

To exercise his leg, Javert paced the room. Occasionally he went out, but only when he knew they, too, would be out for some time.

For all of autumn, the coming and going seemed to follow the habitual schedule, but as months progressed, the routine shifted—something was happening, he was sure, something momentous.

Javert ceased to depart the building. He commissioned the landlady to purchase his daily newspaper and, occasionally, a book on some matter of interest to him.

Across the street, carriages delivered parcels and carried trunks away. He began to fear the family might be on the verge of a relocation. He purchased binoculars that he might track the carriages farther in their journey, and readied his meager possessions that he might follow. A few days later, he read the banns and saw Cosette’s name—Euphrasie Fauchelevent—and that of the man she was to wed, this Marius Pontmercy. 

He was not ashamed to admit to himself the poignancy of emotion he experienced at seeing those names in print. He felt, for Valjean, a great swelling of compassion.

One morning several weeks later, Cosette descended from the doorstep, on Valjean’s left arm, dressed to marry.

 _Odd_ , Javert thought to himself, _that his right arm should be in that sling._ He had observed the sling the last few days, and had wondered at it. Despite his advancing years, in physical strength, Valjean knew no equal. Whatever injury had occurred, it must have caused a trauma of some significance to cost him so ostentatiously the use of his right hand, particularly on the day of Cosette’s wedding.

The carriage driver clucked to the horses and started away toward the church while Javert pondered the unlikeliness of the coincidence that would injure Valjean at so important a juncture in his life. He sat in reflection for at least one-quarter of an hour, and had only reached to pick up a pen to record, belatedly, the time of their departure, when, staring at the implement in his hand, he started. 

Taking hold of his purse and grabbing for his hat, Javert flew from the room with all the speed his underused legs could muster. Down all the flights, and into the street, and then—there! a carriage. Hailing the driver, he clambered aboard and ordered that the man proceed to the Church of St. Paul post-haste.

The church, though, was empty save a few scattered parishioners who knelt at the pews or in the corner alcoves. Javert burst back onto the church steps in time to apprehend the same driver, who had paused to water his horse. 

“There is to be a wedding!” Javert cried in dismay. “But they are not here.”

The cheeky driver at first inquired whether Javert was a spurned bridegroom, but reading rightly the thunderstorm brewing in Javert’s brow, he followed with, “Have they registered it with the mayor yet?”

Disguise be damned, he entered the Mairie with resolute gait and head high, searching for any sign of the party, and presently, down a broad corridor, before a heavy-robed official, he found them. Cosette and her young man stood at center but apparently unconscious to all but each other. 

At the rear of the room, just inside the doorway through which Javert watched them, Valjean stood beside another man, aged but spry and sharply outfitted, and a woman of exceedingly upright posture. All were looking on as the couple signed the documents on the table before them.

The official smiled beneficently upon the two, then looked up. “The father of the bride is present?”

Valjean cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said. Despite his position behind the group, Javert recognized the smile in the man’s tone. “But as luck would have it”—he gestured at the sling that supported his right arm over the fine black suit—“I am not fit to sign the papers.”

Javert saw, in this moment, his chance. Valjean would not sign his false name; he wished to spare the girl another lie. Here, Javert might help. He might enter the room, declare himself a friend to the family, and sign his own name in Valjean’s stead— _M. François Javert, ami de la mariée_. This half-truth might begin to unravel the horrid knot that became more impenetrable every day he allowed himself to continue to live without bringing this criminal, the capture of whom had constituted no small part of his life’s work, to the marble halls of justice.

And indeed, here, in another marble-pillared building, seemed as fitting as any place to begin.

Taking a deep breath to steady his nerve, Javert stepped across the threshold. He would announce himself and to hell with the ignominy that might befall him when it was learned that he, a man long suspected deceased, had given witness to a marriage more than eight months after his supposed death. He would hide no longer. 

At the intrusion of his heavy step, the eyes of those in the chamber turned toward him. The shrewd-eyed old man’s pointed glare seemed to challenge the interloper: be daring or be amusing, but at any rate, be quick about it. The upright younger woman at the man’s side clutched instinctively at the cross that hung from the breast of her gown. Jean Valjean, too, looked upon him, eyes clouded and inscrutable. Javert opened his mouth to speak. He would speak.

Then, on noting the official’s distraction, the bride turned, too. Catching sight of her old friend, she beamed in unfeigned delight.

“Monsieur le Vis!” she exclaimed. “How wonderful that you could attend.”

“Forgive the lateness of my arrival,” Javert said. He could speak politely, but to speak without bluntness was beyond him. Marius, the bridegroom—who, though drawn and pale from the recovery, was indubitably that same young man from whose room Javert had spied upon the “Jondrettes”—seemed to startle at Javert’s voice, but the time and injury, Javert’s altered appearance, and the enormous distractedness of a mind in love prevented his recognizing the former police inspector. “I see that your father is injured. I thought I might—”

Valjean cut him off with an offputting curtness. “Please join us.” He turned abruptly to the front, away from Javert. “If I may continue, Monsieur the mayor, this gentleman beside me is the estimable grandfather to Marius Pontmercy, the bridegroom. Monsieur Gillenormand has graciously agreed to sign the bride’s papers in my stead.”

The old man tottered forward to sign, leaning heavily upon his grandson. Having done so, with a great many curlicues and flourishes, he laid down the pen and then placed heavy kisses on the cheeks of the young man and wife. 

“Now,” he said grandly, “to the church!”

Javert was still watching Valjean. The whole time, Valjean had watched the proceedings with a smile tucked in the corner of his mouth, as a northern fisherman clamps a hard lump of sugar in his cheek when drinking his cup of tea. He gave no indication that he had ever wanted anything better than to allow another man to give away the woman he called his daughter. Now, as Javert stood back to permit the chattering others egress, Valjean’s gaze locked upon him.

“You have returned from abroad.”

“I came to correct an error,” Javert said, mystified by the look of exhausted worry that had instantly swept across Valjean’s shaggy visage. “You cannot sign your sign your name to the papers, so you allow a stranger to take your place. I, at least, have _known_ you. I have known you for decades.” He had not thought, until he said it, that it was time, as much as any pursuit or conquest, that linked them together. He suddenly found the circumstance of Valjean’s anonymity unspeakably sad. Valjean glowered, but Javert persisted. “My familiarity with Cosette is less than yours, less than a father’s, yet we have shared a roof. We are not entirely unlike family.” He came, finally, to his point. “Might I not be permitted to sign for you the second set of records, at the church, if I may accompany you there?”

“Capital, capital!” crowed the grandfather, who had come close just in time to hear the last of these words, and not the request that preceded them. He clasped Javert’s shoulder in his bony claw. “By all means, come to the church, come to the feast thereafter, revel in the cake, quaff the bubbles, stomp the boards. Just keep your distance from the wedding-bed thereafter! To think I should have lived to see, in my eighty years, even one such blessed day! For truly blessed this day is, Monsieur, and the more to partake in the splendor, the merrier. My grandson—is he not the jauntiest bridegroom you have ever beheld? And the bride, so sweet, so true, in every regard the epitome of her delicate sex...”

He continued in this vein, oblivious to Valjean’s response, which, indeed, possessed a subtlety likely beyond the florid old man’s scope of comprehension. Looking first, meaningfully, at his bandaged arm, then at Javert, Valjean rotated his head very briefly—perhaps twenty degrees’ movement from left to right. 

“Think of her,” he said quietly, and Javert saw, then, why fear continued to haunt Valjean. Even now, as she married into prominence and money, his daughter would always be the child of a convict—a truth that, if discovered, might undo her. Were it to become known that Javert, a man believed dead, had signed the papers, he would call untoward attention to the newlyweds. Any investigation into the signer would cast distrust upon the purity of the union. 

Despite the obvious wealth and status of Marius’s relations, no one takes pleasure in finding oneself implicated in association with a dead man who has been lying about his death.

“Entirely adorable!” Monsieur Gillenormand summed up, beckoning the men outdoors where the carriages waited. 

Javert was ushered into the carriage of the stern woman, Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who seemed at closer glance to be near his own age. She asked several pointed questions as to his own identity, but, apparently finding his bland answers insufficiently intriguing, proceeded to detail the bride’s financial contributions to the marriage. “Of course they will reside in the manor,” she sniffed. “My father has given his personal suite to their marriage, and all our fortunes will go to Marius, though of course _she_ brought her own fortune with her.”

Javert listened, with great interest and few enough questions that he would not appear greatly interested, to the details of Jean Valjean’s five hundred and thirty-four thousand francs. _Ah!_ he thought. _So Monsieur Madeleine invested wisely!_

At the church, Valjean gestured that Javert might stand beside him, as one of the family. Javert felt acutely his awkwardness in such a domestic scene, yet also a certain rightness here beside the man who had consumed so much of his life’s thought, and that man’s beloved daughter. 

After, again, Monsieur Gillenormand signed the papers—how could Valjean stand by so placidly, wearing, again, that small smile?—and the carriages carried them all to the Gillenormand home. When the servants began to pass glasses of Champagne, Javert declined. 

“I cannot stay,” he told Cosette, who stood murmuring to her new husband before a massive bouquet of flowers with points like stars. “I am glad to have seen you marry so well.”

As if by sudden impulse, the girl raised her face to his and kissed him, first on one bare cheek, then the other. “Monsieur le Vis,” she said, and her eyes shone in the brilliance of the candlelight, “how we have missed you, our dear friend. I am sure this could not have been as perfect without you.”

Javert found himself profoundly moved.

Outside, he loitered in the shadows further down the street. Presently, the large doors opened again to discharge another guest. From any distance, it would have been clear, even to a person less accustomed to discerning his particular shape, that this second man to leave the wedding party at the Gillenormand house was Jean Valjean.

Javert followed at a careful distance as Valjean walked, indirectly but unperturbedly, down streets less treacherous with ice-capped mud than the popular thoroughfares, home to his rooms on the Rue de l’Homme Armé. The man entered at the front door, lit a candle, and climbed the stairs. Javert did not wonder at the ease with which Valjean lit the candle; the ruse of the injured hand was, to him, evident.

Watching from the icy street below, Javert observed that the light illuminated one room, then another, then another. After some time, he ceased to see it at all, and a discomfort seized upon him. 

_I will enter_ , he decided, and he made his way to the street door, which he thought likely to be left unlocked. Indeed it was. Javert pushed the door open and had only begun to mount the dark staircase when he heard frightful sobs.

Javert paused. 

Javert’s work had taught him discipline; the law had taught him certainty; society’s disapproval had taught him rectitude. None had made much case for compassion. Only in his dealings with Valjean had he found distressing contradiction. Only Valjean had made him waver, and that uncertainty had been his undoing.

After his plunge into the Seine, he had lived without life. All he had left was defined in relation to the Fauchelevents—or, to call them what they were, to Valjean and Cosette. Why had Valjean encouraged the girl to visit with Javert? Why had she befriended him? For _friend_ she had called him, and foreign though the word sounded to his unfamiliar ear, friends he felt them to be. He cared deeply for Cosette, who had brought intelligence and beauty to his meanest hours. Only in his dealings with Cosette had the understanding begun to grow within his soul, like the first sparks catching the tinder in a fireplace, that a parent’s love might exceed the strictures of commonplace affection—that indeed, in extremity, it might clutch at the heart in a manner almost physical.

Javert stood on the stairway and listened to the father sob for his daughter’s acquisition of happiness, and if he did not precisely understand, neither did he disdain the overflowing of emotion.

He knocked on the door.

There was for some time no reply, but the weeping grew less violent, and after some duration, the latch lifted.

Valjean, who was still a man of dominating stature, filled the doorframe. The single candle he held before him in his unbound right hand left his face almost entirely in shadow.

If he were surprised to find Javert at his door, he did not show it.

“Will you come in?” he asked. Javert thought the offer sounded hollow, coming as it did from a man who had minutes earlier been lost to raptures of grief, but he entered regardless, resting his hat on one of the pegs in the entry.

It was strange; he had spent months in this house, but this was the first time he had walked in the door.

In the sitting room, someone had banked the fire earlier in the day. Javert recalled helpful Toussaint, now probably gone to tend to Cosette’s new home with the Gillenormands. Dry wood was stacked at the ready; placing his gloves in his pocket, Javert redistributed the coals and brought the fire to a healthy roar.

As a guest in this home, he had never lifted a finger for the house’s care—not even built the fires that warmed his idle body as he healed. To build a fire was itself a small thing, but Javert was sensible of the far weightier symbolism of this act: that he presumed himself welcome, even in this small way, to play the role of host to Jean Valjean in that man’s own home.

He thought of Cosette telling him that her father tended always to others, never to himself. Should he force the matter? Or would it be kinder, in this moment, to allow Valjean to reclaim his customary role, by burdening him with his own troubles?

Valjean stood with his back to the fireplace, to all appearances unconcerned whether his fingers froze. He had removed his overcoat, hat, and gloves upon arriving home, as was his custom. The house could not have been more than a few degrees from freezing.

Javert was not glad to find Valjean suffering; yet, he was astonished and delighted with himself, for having foreseen it might be so. In his work, he had relied on his ability to marshal both evidence and hunches. In private life, he was glad to see, this skill might still serve.

“She will be happy,” Javert ventured, taking a seat in the fireside chair that had been his, when he stayed here.

“If she is happy, then I am happy,” Valjean returned mechanically. 

“Yet her happiness deprives you of her, and her of you.”

Valjean’s shoulders slumped inexpressibly. “Why have you come here, Monsieur Javert? It cannot be to speak of Cosette. If your aim was to collect me, as you told me you would that night of the sewer, and you have waited this long to make good, I give you my thanks. I asked but a minute. Instead, you have granted me the time to set all my affairs in order. Tell me when to go. I am ready.”

“I am not here to give orders, Valjean. You are no longer my prisoner.” 

Valjean turned at that. 

Why did he turn? To understand, perhaps we must recollect that night, so many months before, when in the mild darkness of June, Javert had—upon apprehending, for what might well have been the ultimate time, his prey—acceded to not one but two impositions into the journey from capture to prison. First, they had delivered Marius, corpse-like but alive, to his family’s home; and they had stopped in the Rue de l’Homme Armé. There, Javert had declined to accompany his quarry upstairs, but had said, “I will wait for you here.” 

In that moment, as he uttered those words, Javert knew that he had changed. 

He knew, without even intending it, that he had lied. He would not wait. He trusted Valjean to return to him, and that was enough. 

Had Javert waited as he had said he would, Valjean would have spoken to his daughter, perhaps, a cautionary word, an encouragement about Marius, a fatherly caress to that rosy cheek and a last look to carry with himself until the cessation of his wretched days, and descended. In fact, he must have actually descended, for such was Valjean’s honor—but Javert had taken his leave immediately. Once he had understood his intentions, he had not wished to prolong his own wallow in the abysses of uncertainty. His choice to free Valjean would not terminate their connection; that much was clear. Indeed, in leaving, Javert had felt a new pull, one not inspired by law but by a personal admiration that anchored itself in his chest. He had to battle this pull, which did all it could to restrain him in his further actions of the evening—in his walk to the station at the Place du Châtelet and thence to the quay from which he had plummeted to, he thought, his earthly end.

Evidently Valjean, too, had felt that pull, for he had followed, and he had not permitted Javert to die. 

“I will always be your prisoner, sir.”

“No,” Javert protested, rising from his chair to stand before Valjean like his equal, and now he realized why he had come: this declaration. “I give you my word: I will never arrest you.” For today, at Valjean’s small warning at the Mairie, Javert had made up his mind. Those three words: _Think of her_. In thinking of her, of Cosette, he could not help but think also of Cosette’s father, of his love for her, of the fragile scaffolding of falsehoods and omissions upon which those two people’s happinesses were erected. In the intervening time, he had thought almost unceasingly of her, and of Valjean. “Today, your daughter takes a new name, and I lose mine. I am Javert no longer.” 

He said it staunchly, yet he shuddered. It had been so for eight months, now, since any but Valjean had called him by that name; and, more significant than the duration of his namelessness, he had been prepared to terminate his existence that he might be nothing _at all_. Instead of death, he would simply relinquish his name. So why did he shudder at the declaration?

Because his whole life, he had been Javert. 

It is a hard thing to be alive and unsure. 

His interlocutor knew this well. “It has been many, many years since I knew myself as Jean Valjean,” the man reflected. “But you have not allowed that part of me to die.”

The accuracy of this observation struck Javert like a blow to the ribs. He recollected that he had—once again—imposed himself upon this solitary man’s tribulations.

Valjean continued. “So perhaps I will not permit you to be anyone but Javert.”

Javert shuddered again. 

“Is he such a horrible man to be?”

Javert, who had tried to kill himself for being Javert, struggled to find the right words. At length, and unwillingly, they fell from him. “As Javert, I always did what was right. My life’s entirety has been enacted in the interests of the law and of the people; the only exception was in my freeing you. But all that I have seen convinces me that, in contradiction to the law, to imprison you, Jean Valjean Madeleine Fauchelevent, would be to commit a crime against decency.” His halting speech paused entirely here that he might glare up at the huge, bowed man before him, the prisoner too great for prison. Would that he were the only such person. But Javert, ever dogged in investigation, could not stop at wishes. If he were here to question the infallibility of law, then he must ask questions. “But tell me, Valjean, are you unique?” His voice broke, in his desperate wish that this, at least, might be true. “Are you, of all criminals, _alone_ in deserving clemency?” For this man, unmistakably, belonged in this world of light and snow and possibility, not the cold desolation of the galley. Yet Javert had arrested so many men.

He looked up at Valjean with fire in his eyes, yet so beseechingly that Valjean could not restrain himself from laying a heavy hand upon the man’s shoulder.

His voice, when he spoke, was low with compassion. “Most criminals bear more likeness to me than to the devils you imagine them to be,” he said.

Javert crumpled. “Thus Javert is compromised.” He had served three decades in the service of the public. How many Jean Valjeans had he put away?

“And yet, when compromised, we may hope to grow.”

“Do you mean this as some sort of solace?” snarled Javert. Then, to his abject horror, an abysmal noise escaped him—otherworldly as a wolf’s howl or a seal’s ragged bark—and hearing it unlocked within him some long-buried store of these hideous sounds, which emanated forth erratically and unmodulated, despite his efforts to stifle them by the cramming of a fist against his mouth so fiercely that he tasted blood.

The hand that gripped his shoulder did not falter. Valjean, still without rising back to his full height, wrapped his other arm around Javert’s back and pulled the piteous mass of a man into the bow of his curved body.

The reader will recall that neither man was much accustomed to physical affection. 

At first, Javert took the embrace as an affront. He stiffened in defiance of the other man’s touch. Javert allowed no one to take liberties with his person, and yet—and yet, he was no longer Javert. He had declared it just moments before, definitely, with absolute resolve, as surely as he had once sworn himself to the law. Who knew what this new person he had become, who was not Javert, would permit? Perhaps humility begins with touch.

He allowed Valjean to hold him. 

The firelight blazed in the gleaming buttons of Valjean’s coat. Javert recalled the ornate candlesticks on the mantle. Regardless of pursuit, regardless of what others called him, Valjean would always be Valjean—a man who knew what he had been. And if that was so, it followed that Javert would always be Javert. Whoever the two of them were, they had spent most of their lives in the meshy folds of the same fisher’s net.

“I have spent my life pursuing you,” Javert muttered to the buttons. There had been entire years when his only dream had been to seize this man by the lapels of his coat and drag him to face the fate he dodged.

Javert touched one button experimentally. His hands, once muscular and coarse from their work of searching and subduing and arrest, had grown reedy in their convalescence and subsequent leisure. The rounded bronze was cold, the suit, likely commissioned particularly for the wedding, new and unfamiliar. 

Javert could not say what moved him to do it, but he straightened in the other man’s arms and pressed his left cheek, warm from his exertions in lighting the fire, to the cold left cheek of Jean Valjean, and there deposited a kiss.This was a common enough gesture, he supposed; Cosette had just this evening so kissed him farewell. Although he was unpracticed in such greetings, he had seen the pattern innumerable times in the markets and on his patrols. Even the Southern guards had done this, in Toulon. He passed his face before Valjean’s, and kissed the other cheek as well. The surface of Valjean’s skin was icy, but he felt heat within.

Valjean’s heavy brows and hooded eyes gave him a hawkish aspect. 

“I have spent mine hiding from you,” he said, and returned the kisses in precise and even form. After the second, his cheek lingered alongside Javert’s.

Javert turned his head to meet it.

It was easier, after that, not to use words.

Javert had built the fire well. Its flames, like ancient messengers, sprang heavenward in robust release, lighting the room with shadows that, rather than dancing or swaying, appeared to caress the two inhabitants as they stood together before the hearth.

It is said that one may counter a lack of skill with a surplus of enthusiasm. In this encounter, that well-worn saying proved once again its worth. Javert had not known to expect the texture of the lips like an early plum, nor the strong and pleasant smell of clean, warm breath against his own, yet he consumed the kiss as fully as a man who has long anticipated the pleasures of touch. His hands, of their own accord, slid apart across Valjean’s broad chest and behind his back. He had reclined against this chest before, when Valjean drugged him. How he had despised, then, Valjean’s ruddy health. Now he was awed by it. It astounded him.

So long they had known each other, and still, in this advanced stage of life, they approached each other with vigor.

Valjean clutched him as they kissed. He was trembling. So was Javert. The one kiss extended into many; the confluence of ardor and decorum preventing their removing their hands to safety but likewise limiting the intrepidity of exploration. Not knowing how to proceed, they dawdled at the gates in this most approachable of the intimacies they could imagine. 

Here, though, a brief interjection may be in order. We have said that neither man knew much of physical love. This is so. However, neither was unacquainted with the organs associated with its essential acts, which may give rise to such broad-ranging emotions as corporeal discomfort, religious guilt, philosophical curiosity, base desire, satiated tranquility, unfettered longing, and, when the body ceases to yearn, despair. This is natural, and Nature, above all others, demands that her processes find light. Rare the man who achieves maturity without such congress with the somatic self. 

Javert, for one, tended to brevity in his address of the organ in question; yet, he did not disavow its interests.

Therefore, Javert was not taken aback by the sudden rise of pressure at the hip where Valjean pressed against him. He _was_ disconcerted at the alacrity of his own body’s response. 

This was a closeness he had never imagined, he was sure of it. Never had he anticipated the feel of another being so close to him in such states of amorous thrall. He spared a thought for the former Javert, who would take in such a scene with veritable disgust. Then he thought of now—arms holding what his mind had too long sought, body aching exquisitely for contact, not conquest. He owed Jean Valjean everything, and was owed equally, in every respect, by that same man.

Valjean stepped abruptly away. He was magnificent in his height and carriage; the unseemly prominence in his trousers only called attention to their fine tailoring and fit. 

His eyes, frank and unafraid, sought Javert’s. “You will stay.” Was it a question? A declaration? An order? No listener could say.

Javert said, “Yes.”

Obtaining from the fire a flaming log, which he placed in a metal carrying pan with a padded handle, kept beside the fireplace for this purpose, and shifting the other wood to form a low heap that would burn slowly through the night, Valjean made for his bedchamber. Javert followed. 

Valjean’s room was small and severe in its decoration. The banked coals glowed dimly in the small fireplace. Valjean added the log, which shot immediately back into flame, and propped around it a few more sturdy pieces from the bin beside the hearth.

Javert lingered near the door.

“Join me,” said Valjean, removing his coat to a straight wooden chair in the corner. 

Let us spare a word for Jean Valjean. Ought we to infer from the ease with which he began at that interlude to disentangle the wrapped bands of his cravat, as though he were preparing alone for his ascetic repose, a certain comfort with these proceedings? This inference would be overhasty. The man’s hands operated mechanically, loosening the trappings of his dress, but his eyes’ attention was entirely fixed upon the police inspector who stood at his threshold.

Valjean let the unbound muslin of the cravat hang. It was fine and light and retained some memory of the twists and contortions with which it had previously been styled. He unfastened the buttons of his waistcoat, then it joined the coat on the chair.

In his loose shirt and braces, Valjean was as commanding as any martinet in military regalia. 

Javert entered the room and closed the door.

There was no second chair, but a row of unoccupied hooks lined the wall behind the door. 

Despite the austerity of the room, the bedclothes were plentiful. Valjean had climbed into bed wearing only his unbuttoned shirt and drawers. In this, too, Javert followed his lead. He recalled that Valjean had undressed him the delirious night of the rescue; his physiognomy held no secrets from this man. Still, it is one thing to be exposed in the uncomplicated urgency of medical need, and quite another to be seen in one’s shirt in a moment of premeditated complicity.

He pulled the down-filled covers to his chin. 

It was a narrow bed, meant perhaps for one man and his small wife. The two large men lay shoulder to shoulder with only the thin linen of their shirts between them.

For a short time, they lay there. Javert felt himself to be breathing roughly, but perhaps that was Valjean. Neither knew how to proceed.

Then Valjean moved below the sheets, and his hands emerged and rose above Javert’s chest. Shadowy in the red firelight, they were an offering. 

“Take them,” Valjean said. “You will not arrest me. But take me.”

It was an invitation beyond his imagining. Javert’s big hand curved to hold together Valjean’s wrists. He pulled them down, and the powerful man beside him rolled toward him.

It is unlikely that Javert, in that moment, spent much time in reflection. Had he done so, however, he might perhaps have named the shared bed a chimera—long sought, yet always beyond reach. He had never, not even while a guest in this home, considered the prospect of comfort in the company of Jean Valjean, yet here they were, and despite the tension in Javert’s shoulders—a tension familiar but nearly forgotten, a weight inextricably bound in his memory to the solemnity of epaulettes—as he pulled the criminal toward him, still, the bed below them was soft and yielding and the air of the room, though warming, still brisk. The moment was real. 

“I want to have you,” Javert said. He could not have said what inspired the words; he did not know what he meant by them, or how—but they were true.

“You have me already.”

“How?”

In illustrative answer, Valjean drew his hands, and Javert’s,which held them, to his sturdy chest. “Take me,” he said again, sliding their shared hands down the front of his own body, until his intention became clear. “Capture me.”

Directing his gaze to the plain ceiling, Javert felt his face lock into the hardness to which it had been accustomed in his police days. In his lifetime of service, he had never experienced such a surrender. 

The submission made him bold.

“Like this?” he asked, and he let go of Valjean’s wrists to take hold of something lower, which pressed up through the shirt as if it, too, longed to be taken prisoner.

Valjean stilled in his grip.

“Yes,” he said.

With a few firm gestures, Javert’s hand undid the drawers’ laces and made swift reconnaissance of Valjean’s physique.

As his fingers closed around Valjean, Javert felt sweep into his person an unaccountable stillness. It was the stillness he had imagined must possess the beneficent angels who had been his invisible compatriots in his silent childhood hours of kneeling prayer, the unearthly calm he had hoped to feel upon crashing through the water’s surface in his plunge from the quay: a calm that had never before in his life entered upon his restive soul.

Valjean—hot, robust, virile—was in his grasp, fully in his grasp. He was Javert’s. He had asked that Javert take him.

The world, as Javert knew it, was no more.

He allowed his hand to loosen just enough that it might move without causing his captive distress. He let it travel slowly up the length of the shaft, then back down, like a policeman patrolling a single street, up and down. Up and down. 

Beside him, Valjean’s own hands clutched at one another across his belly, not far from where Javert had let them go. Even as his hips lost restraint, Valjean kept his hands close, and his lips pressed tight. He seemed unwilling to reach out or to be heard. 

Javert’s methodical fist halted abruptly. At his side, Valjean groaned. 

“Do you wish for release?”

“I will never have it.”

Could a bystander have read the thoughts that assailed Javert’s mind in that moment, they would have seen only this: _Nor I._

Aloud, Javert said only, “No, not while I live.” 

“An eternal never if you did not.” Valjean’s voice was very low, nearly a growl. The sound provoked a renewal of Javert’s attentions, and when Valjean continued to make such noises, Javert could no longer disguise the avidity of his interest. His hand patrolled faster.

“You have not answered my question.” Javert rolled to his side so that he might look Valjean in the eye. 

Valjean’s eyes were dark pools of shadow. “Yes, I wish that we will find release. Yes, Javert. Me and you.”

Power contaminates human interaction. As a strong wind may force some flags straight and tear others to scraps, a powerful man can never be certain of his effects on others. Thus, their true natures must, to him, remain something of a mystery—at least, until his power dissipates or theirs gathers.

In the last year, Valjean had used the familiar “you” with him innumerable times. It had felt presumptuous at first, later condescending. This was the first time that Javert felt them to be equals.

Javert saw, then, into the depths of Jean Valjean. It was a profundity as near to him as his own beating heart, and as mysterious—a life spent in obligation and self-abnegation and the isolated pursuit of existential comfort. Hours ago, this would have terrified him.

“If I am to have you,” he said, punctuating the point with a firm traversal of Valjean’s considerable length, “then you must have me in return.”

Then Valjean pushed up onto an elbow. He kissed Javert, first one cheek, then the other, and then his rough sideburns rested atop Javert’s so that Javert could hear the irregularities of breath as he stroked Valjean and as Valjean reached down to help him, too, escape the confines of his laced drawers.

Javert was glad to feel the sharp prickle of Valjean’s face against his own as Valjean took him in hand. He would not have been ashamed to have Valjean see him so; but, he firmly felt, to see again into the remarkable accumulation of history, of ignominious subjugation and private triumph, that constituted Valjean’s person, in that moment, would have been more than he could bear.

Javert’s own breath felt hot, Valjean’s body crowding it back against him. Below the covers, their hands moved in synchrony, drawing from one another heavy breaths. 

“I will have you soon, Madeleine,” Javert gasped.

“ _C’est pas moi_ ,” grunted Valjean, pulling steadily at him even as his voice wavered.

“Fauchelevent, then,” Javert said.

“ _Non_.” It was an animal’s roar, compressed to the vocal capacity of a man.

Javert had little choice but to relent. “Valjean.”

“My _name_ ,” Valjean insisted, voice penetrating. “Say my name.”

Javert turned his head to kiss the grizzled cheek. It was an unlikely kiss, one that employed tongue and teeth in addition to the usual lips, but Javert felt certain that in such a place, it would not be untoward. “You are mine now, Jean.”

Valjean seemed, then, to grow in his hand suddenly so large that Javert found it difficult to maintain his tempo. Fortunately, this seemed not to matter. He felt Valjean stiffen and their faces rake across one another, felt Valjean’s teeth catch for an instant at his ear, heard Valjean stutter what might in another man have been an oath. Then, his hand was wet and Valjean gasping, and in this heated confluence of breath and sound and human epiphany, Javert, too, found momentary release.

He did not mean to cry out, but he did, for it was as if he were expelling all that had made him Javert—the need and the want, the rigidity and the fear—and that these qualities all melded and reformed into one word, one name, from which he could begin anew: _Jean_.

When the moment had passed, it seemed appropriate to relinquish his hold. It would not be right, he thought, to hold another man as he lost firmness.

He clutched his hands in fists at his sides, where they would not attempt to reach again for Valjean, and closed his eyes to blot out the firelight that still illuminated the room.

The blankets folded back, and he heard Valjean chuckle. Had he ever heard this? No. He had certainly never heard Valjean laugh before, and yet, there could be no doubt that this laugh emitted from Valjean; had there been not one but one hundred other men in the room, all laughing, Javert would still have known the man by the unfamiliar yet essential quality of his laughter.

“We are a mess, Javert.”

Javert lay still. His eyes remained closed. Valjean moved away across the room, and returned with a basin and cloth. The water was cold—a fact which did not trouble Javert. He had known worse deprivations.

They were a mess. This was evident—both exiles from the world of laws, one an ardent believer in an ethical code to which he could no longer claim himself an adherent; the other an adherent to a code of goodness that transcended ordinary belief. They were outside, each of them, alone looking in at a world to which they did not belong. Perhaps this, then, explained the willingness to be taken captive. Even imprisonment requires a mutual recognizance.

He permitted Valjean to clean him, to refasten and adjust his garments, to pull the bedclothes straight and to nestle again below them, beside him. When he felt breath on his cheek, he rolled to his side to look.

“A mess, you said.” Javert found that he enjoyed the obscure darkness of Valjean’s eyes so near his own.

“We were. I’ve set us to rights.” 

Valjean seemed unlikely to suggest Javert’s removal from the bed. Despite the confined space, Javert found he was loath to offer it himself.

“You will stay?” Valjean asked now. He had said it when they entered the room. Then, it had been definite. Now it was a question.

Javert was surprised that it was a question. Had he been less than clear? Had he not properly conveyed his willingness to forfeit all he had been, if he might only find a place for himself in this house, in this home, in the company of this man?

“You have played host to me twice now,” Javert said. “And I never gave thanks for the first. If you will have such an ungrateful guest...” 

Valjean chuckled again—a beautiful sound. “I will.”

“Then I will stay,” Javert agreed.

Valjean stretched a heavy arm up to wrap around Javert’s shoulder and back.

“Do you have another name?” he asked.

“My given name is François.”

“ _Bienvenu,_ François,” Valjean said, and smiled at him.


End file.
